April 12, 1998

I had watched the house for hours; it was a small detached house near Richmond's Park in London. It was a quiet place, near a small wizarding shop conglomerative that sold basic potions for pharmaceuticals. It was basically the outskirts of wizarding society, but still close enough to be counted as part of it.

The house and neighborhood itself were nonmagical in nature, not what I would have expected from Alex, but it was easy enough to confuse the No-Majs out of their homes- there were many reports about the practice these days. There were none of the markers of a wizarding house. No missing numbers on townhouses, no spells visible to the magical or unusually well-tended flower gardens or... No wait. I saw a gleam of something on the gate. A shimmer of power to repel those without the gift of magic. Thalia had something similar around her property, not as blatant, but it was there.

That was a very American styling of magic.

I had not seen anything suspicious over the last few hours I had spent watching the house. No one had gone in. No one had left. There was no movement from the windows or smoke from the chimney despite the chill of the final winds of Spring in the air. I could see the No-Majs and their children walking down the street in their nice clothes, completely oblivious to the war they could not see and the absolute ignorance the suffering of a world they could never understand. This seemed to be a kind of Spring holiday for them. It was a strange dichotomy of two worlds being so close and so far from one another.

I had not slept since I left the apartment. I was powered onwards by coffee and my own drive to press forward. There had been no time to rest. I had been pushed forward by something inside of me that needed to see this search through, a kind of thrill of adventure and familial love mixed in with something primal that pushed me forward.

I stepped out from behind the tree, clutching my cloak tightly as the darkness settled around me – the sun finally disappearing over the buildings in the distance. It was not comfortable to be out in the evening hours these days, but I needed the safety of shadows and I was willing to take the chance. I glanced down the street, allowing my charms to fade as I stepped out into the street and towards the house. I put my hand on the gate, the tingling power under the spell moving up my arm and fading to allow me entry to the property.

It had a short cobblestone pathway, the kind of thing I would expect an elderly couple to have. A nice walkway with grass for the grandchildren to play in sort of deal. It was not quite the sort of living arrangement I wanted with Percy, I wanted something further out in the country for privacy and when the rush of London life wore off for Percy, he would not be hard to give a few final nudges in the direction that it was time to leave the city and look for a countryside cottage.

I miss Percy.

But I can't dwell on that now. I'm here for Alex. He needs my help; I will not turn my back on him.

I moved up the front step and sighed quietly, casting a spell to confirm the presence of someone living in the house. My wand whirred and the outline of a blue, living person in the living room flashed through the wall for a brief moment.

Should I knock? Should I break down the door? I did not know what was beyond it.

The street was quiet. Almost too quiet, but silence had become a far too frequent aspect of my life of late. Every cat coming out of a dumpster could be a Death Eater coming to lay harm upon innocent people, magical or not.

There was a rustling and creaking from the other side of the door. I jumped back as a muffled voice shot through the door.

"Who are you?"

"A-Audrey Graves!" My voice trembled as I spoke. "State your name!"

"Alex Graves," the voice seemed uncertain, his voice pausing slightly before he spoke. It must have been the shock of me turning up on the doorstep. "What was our favorite game at Jack's political rallies?"

"Hangman and the math puzzles you made up the night before." I paused to think of a good question. "What was the name of the first article you wrote for the Ilvermorny school paper?"

"Political Uncertainty and Modern Economic Practices!"

The door swung open to reveal my brother and with only a moment's hesitation I threw my arms around his neck in the tightest hug I had ever given in my life.

Alex hauled me into his home and kicked the door closed before putting his arms around me awkwardly.

"Are you okay?" My voice was fast and panicked, I pulled away to examine Alex with a critical eye. "What happened?"

I took in his face. He looked very much like a younger version of our father. Alex's hair was mostly white now, the rest of the gray in varying shades and it was fading quickly. He was a hard looking thirty that way. Alex had pushed his hair back in his usual way, allowing a rogue lock to tumble over his forehead in a way that was quite dashing, an effort to look his age in what ways could be managed without losing too much respect looking older will bring a man. His face a bit stubbled with a five o'clock shadow that made him look very much the part of an overworked journalist with the addition of shadows under his eyes and the beginnings of a crow's foot wrinkle at the corners of his eyes.

"I'm fine, really!" His voice was muffled by the sheer force of me pulling him back into a hug.

"I missed you," my voice was muffled in his shoulder, he smelled familiar but somehow different. Perhaps it was just my memory or a new soap. "I came as soon as I got your message! Why was it so hard to find you?"

We released each other and I finally stopped away from Alex who seemed so confused by this outpouring of affection.

"I'm sorry, I'm safe now, there's no need to worry yourself any further. I was caught up in my work is all." He smiled at me and squeezed my shoulders.

"I'm not just going to accept that!" I looked up at Alex, my hands shaking and near tears from the stress of the last two days. "Why would you call me like that? What happened?"

Alex shrugged, seemingly too casual about this clear near-death experience that made him reach out to me for help. "I got in some trouble a few days ago, Erebus got clipped on the way out, which might be why he took so long to get to you. It's handled, there is nothing else to worry about." He smiled down at me roguishly. "Tea or coffee?"

I thought of Percy's preference for strong tea with the bare minimum of sugar and tried not to miss him as my head throbbed from the lack of sleep. I would return to him soon. "Coffee please. I need it quite badly."

This was going to be a very long talk.

Alex guided me into the house and I took in the decorations that did not suit my brother at all. The house seemed to belong to an older couple, judging by the pictures on the wall; it appeared I had been correct in my assumptions about the true owners. It was odd to have the pictures of the residents up in the house, but perhaps if Alex had to leave in a hurry or hide himself, it would cast enough momentary doubt on his presence.

The husband and wife both had white hair and happy expressions as they stood arm in arm in front of their house for a picture. The wife had a soft, round face and her husband in contrast was very thin and had large hands, as if he had spent his life doing physical labor despite his thin stature. I did not know what sort of work the No-Majs engaged in, my understanding was they needed to be more physical in their endeavors due to their lack of magic.

I hoped that Percy and I would live to be that old and content with ourselves. Sometimes the knowledge of everything we had seen and experienced over the last year had taken that opportunity away from us.

I took a seat at the kitchen table, taking in the white table cloth and lace doilies that would have slightly impressed Lucinda and allowed myself to take in the space and the figure of my brother in a domestic setting. There was a rose wallpaper on the kitchen wall and tiles on the floor with matching roses and the effect was very charming and spoke to the age of the true owner in the same measure.

I knew Alex was capable of living a quiet sort of life for a time, Thalia was proof of that, but I had not seen Alex in a quiet place in the comfort of his own home for almost a decade. How strangely intimate that is to witness. The way he taps his fingers as he makes coffee, adding in the spoonful of sugar I requested and the syrup he offered was quickly accepted – that was one thing I had struggled to find in Britain.

Even under this pleasurable image, there was something… very different about Alex. He seemed uncertain in a way – to domestic in others. This was not the same man who had a screaming match with our father before storming away in a huff to never be seen again. No. This was different in another way...

Alex was a smoker. I remembered he had started fairly young once he started writing for the school paper, his clothes always smelled like Sparkers cigarettes but he was so careful to hide it from father. He would go to the back garden and climb over the fence into the neighbor's orchard. The orchard was so expansive that our neighbor's house was over a mile away. Alex had never been caught with his particular vice and if our father knew, he would not say anything unless Alex was doing it publicly or was dumb enough to get caught.

Why was there so much clean air in this house? I couldn't smell anything other than clean air. There were no attempts to cover the smell of smoke with incense. Nobody would set foot outside these days to smoke, so the safest place would be from a window, and if that were the case it should be all over his clothes.

My wand was giving a low, musical hum that was only perceptible to my ears as Alex gave me a cup of coffee and levitated the sugar to the table.

"We have a lot to talk about."

I nodded in agreement as I caressed my mug of coffee, letting it warm my hands before I spoke. The exhaustion and pain of a growing headache behind my eyes made my eyes heavy.

"The last time I saw you was when we duelled outside of Hagstun."

My voice must have come across as chilly because Alex had paused and stopped like a statue. His shoulders moved as he took a deep breath.

"I... I'm sorry."

My spine straightened in the seat and I watched Alex move away from the counter to sit at the table, caressing his own mug and looking into it as if it possessed the secrets of the world in its murky depths.

"Sorry?" I said slowly, letting the word sit between us like a heavy wall. "You've hurt others. You hurt me." My face shifted; my lower lip trembled for a moment until I got a hold of myself. I would not cry in front of Alex. That was not his privilege. "You liked fighting for your dark master."

"I'm... There is no excuse for it." Alex looked at me, looking at me as if another decade had passed in moments. "I was taken in and thought I could navigate everything to try and accomplish what I wanted and I lost sight of everything important to me." He fiddled with a spoon, the clangs against the fancy bird embossed mug echoed quietly through the kitchen.

That... was as much as I was going to get on the matter from Alex. That was alright. I was content.

"Have you spoken with Thalia?"

Alex paused, his brow furrowing slightly. "Not lately. We have an understanding about that."

"Well, I'm a bit invested because she's my sister-in-law and I actually really like her." I straightened in my chair and stirred my coffee a couple of times to distract myself, tapping my spoon on the side of the mug, the noise sounding through the room like a bell as I watched the smoke rise from the brown liquid. "She loves you. Go home to her."

"I have things I need to finish. Thalia understands."

Yes. They were two very independent people who agreed that they could love each other through that. Time and distance did not diminish them or offer less validity to their romance. I noted the lack of ring on Alex's finger, an understandable choice given his circumstances and that of his marriage, but it was odd not to see such a symbol on his person.

"Alex," My voice was low as I reached for answers – confirmation that Alex had walked away and somehow managed to keep his life. "After all of this, after everything that you have seen... What do you really think of You-Know-Who?"

Alex froze, his shoulders tensing in a clear nervousness at the blunt direction this had taken. When Alex spoke, his words were measured and careful. "He's greater than any dark wizard our family has fought in America. He's truly powerful in a way I'm not sure we can comprehend – a warlock of unspeakable power. Why?"

"It's just... You seemed so committed to what you believed he offered when we were in Hagstun."

The tension stayed with Alex, it was in his jaw and the grip he had on his mug. "I was never going to get it that way. I got in too deep and couldn't see a way out until you fought me at Hagstun. It was the push I needed to take a step back and re-evaluate my position." Alex glanced at me with a tired sort of smile, "Maybe you're not as much like Jack as I said you were."

That cut two ways, but the compliment was nice and this relationship still to new and strange for criticism, even in jest.

"Maybe you were right about what I had become."

"Are you admitting that I was right about something?"

Alex laughed, it was dry and short, more a chortle than a true laugh. "Enjoy, it may never happen again."

I stirred the coffee again, my wand vibrated against my arm in the holster as I did so. The coffee was still too hot, smoking and I leaned back in my seat contentedly.

I could speak of this only to my brother and Thalia. People who understood what dark secret wiggled tensely under my skin. My skin grew tighter, colder and the weight of everything settled around me like a cloak. Since Scrimgeour's assassination by You-Know-Who, there was something that had shifted in my nature. Lucinda had mentioned parselmouths in the Ainsley family and it awakened a sort of curiosity in me that I... may not have been ready to explore, but had been prodding in my mind in lonely hours.

Was my nature set in stone? After the scar of Vol... You-Know-Who, would parselmouths ever been seen as people and not monsters? I could never reveal myself, but what of others? Would they be painted with this brush of association?

"They say that all snake-talkers are dark wizards." I chose my words carefully and caressed the mug of coffee I had yet to drink as my wand continued to shake and hum against my arm. "No matter what they choose to do with the ability or don't do with it - "

"Of course, they are!"

My blood ran cold, my hands entwining so tightly that the knuckles turned white.

"Think about it Audrey," Alex's brows furrowed in an inscrutable expression of surprise as he continued, a familiar arrogance returning to his demeaner. "Parselmouths can create their own spells, a craft only accessible to those who have the power! They can't be trusted!"

"I'm sure that's not the whole truth of the matter." Keeping a civil tongue in my head was an active effort as my mind whirred and grasped horrible possibilities. Lucinda had said nothing bad about her ancestors, they were just a tightly held secret, a source of embarrassment, a risk to safety and social standing, not founts of maliciousness. Rebekah Graves had avenged a murdered child with her ability.

"Jack's acceptance of them is an affront to decency! We both know they need to be watched to prevent another Dark Lord from rising!"

"Hsst!"

The sound left my throat, controlled as it never had been before unless I was looking at a snake as I drew my wand level with my not-brother. This person looked terrified at inviting a monster like me into his abode. His eyes were wide and frightened in a way that told me everything over the last several minutes had been a deception. That Alex was not here, might not have ever been here and this person would know far more about it then I would.

I would not hesitate.

'Stupify!'

"Depulso!"

The spell threw me into the living room. My body went through the coffee table, splintering the wood, pieces piercing my legs and back. My ears were ringing from my head hitting the edge of the sofa and then the floor below.

The man who looked like Alex, but was not, stepped into the room with a look of such hate in his eyes it reminded me strongly of Alex when our father came up in conversation. All blazing, passionate fury and something dark under the surface that I was never able to touch.

"You could have made this easier if you drank your coffee." It was my brother's voice, but the accent sounded English or lowland Scottish, my head was ringing too badly to be entirely sure. The man stepped forward, holding my brother's wand in his hand. I recognized the vulture carved into the base of the handle. Another American tradition for those who could cast a patronus. "Now we need to do this the hard way."

"Where is Alex!" I demanded, somehow getting to my feet, powered by fear and my own rage. "Where is my brother!"

The impersonator smiled but did not oblige me with an answer. There was all of the smug confidence of Alex mixed in with something nefarious.

No. I did not know who this was, but he needed to take his hands off my brother's wand!

As I reached for the spell to start disarming this imitation of Alex, the wand he was holding began to burn in his hand. The pretender dropped it with a pained curse, shaking out his hand as he pulled out what was presumably his own wand. My brother's wand disappeared into the corner as I fired off a confingo curse that was quickly rebounded into the nearby fireplace mantle, sending marble stone and picture frame remnants in all directions.

With a swish of my wand, I turned the pieces of stone into arrows, sending them flying through the air with a faint hissing noise. A conjured shield blocked the arrows and was thrown at me in retaliation. I caught the shield with a spell, transfiguring it into an executioner's axe and flinging the massive weapon across the room so aggressively my opponent had to turn and duck down to avoid getting bisected.

"Deprimo!" A powerful wind shot down from the ceiling above and slammed me into the floor. I rolled onto my back trying to catch my breath, wheezing from the impact.

I continued struggling to catch my breath as the impersonator climbed over me, looking down at me with my brother's face, with my brother's eyes and a disgusting expression of hate and lust that filled me with disgust and horror.

My brother's hands were gripping my top, pulling it away from me and tearing it away.

When I screamed, I was backhanded across the jaw.

For a moment, I was stunned. The affront and shock of blatant abuse had frozen me for a moment as hands found their way into my bra, a knee between my legs to impede my struggle and it all clicked together.

This... had never been intended as a duel.

There had been other plans for me.

My teeth sunk into his chin as he leaned down to try and kiss me, quickly abandoning that idea with a scream and retaliating with another blow to my head.

When his hands wrapped around my throat, I could see a glimpse of thin, spidery black veins moving up his arm. I gasped as his hands gripped my throat and squeezed tightly as I struggled and hit and kicked every part of the impersonator I could reach.

The noises I tried to make were stifled. I was conscious, aware of the world around me fading to shadow as this man who wore Alex's face touched me and revelled disgustingly at my helplessness under him.

This was wrong!

In that moment, the fear and rage that burned under my skin exploded outward. The windows shook and dust fell from the rafters above.

The man wearing Alex's face hit the wall, with a loud bang, leaving a dent in the wall before he slid down to the floor. I climbed to my feet on shaking legs and caught my breath and tried not to cry. My clothes were still mostly on, mostly intact, and I was still alive to handle this.

Hold it together Audrey.

I picked up my wand from where it had landed in the scuffle on the floor before I summoned my assailant's wand from where it had rolled under a nearby table, feeling the grain of the wood and the dark, smooth handle in my hand as I looked down that the bleeding man at my feet.

With a swipe of my wand, I revealed his face. His hair began to go from grey and white to a mousey brown color, his face shortened and thinned, the elements of my father's defined jaw fading away to almost nothing in moments.

I did not have to watch the rest of this to know who was before me.

How long had Harrow Avery been wearing the face of my brother?

He looked up at me with an expression of utter hatred that I hoped to never see again of a living soul's face. It's promised more than the violence he had already attempted to inflict upon me.

The rage boiled up inside of me.

"Where. Is. Alex." My words were tense, tight and forced out of me in an open rage that left me shaking in both terror and adrenaline. Threats felt unnatural and wrong on my tongue, but they danced there now as I fiddled with Harrow's wand.

I snapped Harrow's wand in my hands, the core sparking with fire that quickly smothered itself as the last flickers of life left the wand. I threw the pieces aside into the kitchen. The clatter of them on the floor was both horrific and fascinating.

Harrow was breathless from the collision with the wall. There was blood running down the back of his head, I could see it moving down his neck and staining his shirt. His eyes were heavily shadowed, with deep bags of exhaustion beneath them and an unhealthy pallor to his face. He seemed to stare beyond me for some moments with a haunted expression.

There was fear and hate in his eyes that left a sort of impression on the power I now wielded over him. Any lust Harrow felt for me had faded when he learned the truth of me, now he was just the hateful man he had always been without any need to wear a mask to try and win me into an easier alliance.

I tried to wipe the image of Alex above me, the lust and hate in his eyes as I tried to replace the false mask with that of the true culprit. An act I would never truly succeed in.

"I guess Graves was more talented than I gave him credit for."

My grip on my wand tightened, the tips sparking with barely restrained magic as my mind raced.

"I invaded his mind and there was nothing about the monster you are!" Harrow spat, coming back to himself and staring into my eyes.

I clutched my shirt closed and thought that Harrow and I had very different definitions of what made a monster.

"Answer the question!"

Harrow shrugged, a twisted sort of smile on his face. "Or you'll kill me? No, I'm dead anyway." Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

I took note once more of the blackened veins that moved up Harrow's inner arm. Was that some sort of curse? Something like that would be covered by Polyjuice potion otherwise.

Fuck it.

'Legilimens!'

He was fighting me, trying to throw me out of his mind and push me to other places that were less incriminating. I forced the image of a snake into Harrow's mind and broke through the barrier with such force he stopped fighting for a moment, allowing me to shatter the wall, rip it down like paper and hurt Harrow in a way he would struggle to describe.

I saw flashes of memory, senseless memories of Voldemort, flashes of Alex, clad in black robes and his vulture mask in hand. Senseless chatter that I could not decipher, all a hum of background noise with nothing discernible. It was as if a foreign language was being spoken. Harrow still had enough of a grip to force me away and throw me away into other places. I ignored the passing visions of Harrow's mother discussing Thornell with Lucinda. I was so far beyond that issue.

Alex was speaking and I could see Voldemort was speaking with him, this monster with his deathly pallor and crimson eyes peering at my brother as Alex stood firm and spun his stories. Alex spoke horrid things. That the nonmagical were animals, who deserved to be crushed under the boot of the powerful and serve wizardkind. That magic was might. How quickly America would fall to this philosophy Voldemort expounded – then the image faded.

Suddenly, a thing – a monster that was familiar to me in a way I could not fully grasp lingered in front of my eyes. A bird skull with the antlers of a deer and that was covered in black feathers and moss that trailed behind it. I was in the forest again, but I was not myself, I was different. My hands were too big, this world offered none of the apparent friendliness of my own recollections and the creature had its hands around my neck and squeezing. Its grip grew tighter, lifting me from the ground to dangle helplessly as it choked me, ignoring my pained noises. The monster pulled me closer and screamed in my face before I lost consciousness. I sat up in a fine room that was not my own, the pain from my neck radiating down my body as I looked at the hands were not mine and the blackening veins that spidered up the wrists that did not belong to me!

I gripped my head, pulled at my own hair and tried to come back to my own body and grasp the idea of what I had just seen.

Harrow shoved me to the ground as he fled out the door. I was too disoriented to pursue him. Harrow held no interest to me at this point, he had no wand and I was too tired, too shaken up, to contain him here. My only thought was finding a clue to Alex's location, because there had to be something!

"Huminum Revelio!"

There was something. A pull on my wand.

A thrilled cry escaped my lips and I followed the light and down the hallway of the house. I was pulled and guided, yanked about like a puppet on a string.

I whispered "Alex!" as I went through the rooms my wand pulled me into a master bedroom with an ensuite bath that had been lived in. An office nearby, filled with papers I recognized as having my brother's handwriting with books strown about the room in a form of organized chaos I did not understand.

I screamed "ALEX!" as I cast the spell again, double checking that there was no one else in the house as I moved to other parts of the house, compelled and pulled past family pictures of strangers. Children in varying stages of growing up, school pictures with toothy, gaped smiles.

Again, I was pulled, this time towards what appeared to be a back room of some sort. I pushed the door open with such force it bounced off the wall behind it with a bang.

This had to be it.

"Alex!"

The room was empty. The bed was untouched, the beige curtains were closed and there were no personal effects in the room itself. A guest bedroom. Untouched by humans in quite some time. I moved closer to the bed and ran my fingers over the surface of the dresser. Dust.

"Where are you?"

I felt watched but there was nothing in the room.

"Please be here!"

I looked under the bed, hoping for a miracle and that this was not for nothing.

"I can't... I need to know what happened!"

I flung myself through the room like a wild creature, looking for secret passages, old magic, carvings in the wall – please let there be a sign!

Something turned my attention to the closet. Either a pull towards the only place I had yet to check or a sort of guidance before I could reach my breaking point.

In my panic, I had barely registered the faint smell of... something. It was musty and harsh; it would be overpowering if I got any closer to the source. What in the world...?

I paused and collected myself. There was something in here. I knew I needed to look, thoroughly examine every corner of this place for signs of my brother's presence. If I found nothing here, I would go to the office and scour the papers, but I could not focus on paperwork until I had seen the rest of the house and cleared it. After the events that had passed, I needed certainty that I was safe here in order to investigate.

The smell grew more rank and overpowering as I moved closer to the closet. There was something... wrong about all of this. I did not want to get closer. I did not want to open the door, but something compelled me. Something whispered in my ear a series of words I did not understand and suddenly the door was opened and I found only an empty closet with a horrible, lingering odor.

The floorboards beneath me were wooden and loose, creaking under my feet with every shift of my weight as my wand pulled me down to the ground below.

I found the loosest floorboard and pulled it up with a spell, the nails flying free of the wood to scatter into corners.

There was space under the floor.

I set the board aside and pulled away another.

"Lumen." A ball of light ejected itself from the tip of my wand and floated above me, offering a dim light like a dying star.

I continued to pull away the floorboards, they came up too easily as if they had been removed before.

There was something under the floor.

My hands began to tremble and I lifted the rest of the boards away, flinging them into the bedroom behind me as a horrible smell filled the air. Musty and rotten.

When the light began to chase back the darkness, revealing everything that had been hidden, the noise that escaped me was one of horror.

"NO!"

The corpse was shrivelled and horrifying, with long teeth from the tightening skin and shrivelled gums, giving it an expression of horror and rage with bared teeth and a vengeful expression. The skin was tight and there was blood around the fingernails where they had been ripped away in an act of failed attempts to escape this prison. In a way, it was caught in a moment in time, half frozen and half decayed from the passage of time.

I knew this face, even half sunken inwards, sallow and waxy. The greying hair that was too long now and unkept, some fallen to patches of silver, some ripped away to reveal patches of skin beneath. The strong set of his jaw and the pack of Sparkers cigarettes peeking out of his pocket.

The wordless wail that tore itself from my throat shook the foundations of my soul and the last remnants of my hope.

My brother was dead.

Oo0Oo0

Author's Note: Um. Happy Halloween? I've had Alex's death planned since the conception of this story, seeing him in it alive was thanks to all of you.

Also, Easter Monday (the resurrection of Jesus) is the same date as this chapter – when the women find his empty tomb and hear word of his resurrection. I like irony.

Posting resumes Nov 17.